One of the biggest questions I am asked by business owners is ‘How To Boost Posts on Facebook‘ without wasting loads of money. Sadly it also seems to be one of the biggest frustrations and they have spent a small fortune in the process by simply not knowing what to do.

In this blog post I try to break down how to boost posts on Facebook in a simple step by step process and some dodgy red arrows on my screen shots so you know what to do!

PLEASE NOTE – Facebook Ads are consistently changing so I will try to keep this blog post as up to date as possible.

Do not press the BOOST Post button!

So I am assuming at the very least you have a Facebook business page (if not you should, you can not create Facebook Ads without one) and you know what I am talking about when I say the ‘Boost Post’?

Once you have created a status you will see a ‘Boost Post’ button on the bottom right. You know what I am talking about now right? (HINT – Look at the big right arrow on the image below)

I want you to think of this as LEVEL 1 of Facebook Advertising. Sure, if you press it and boost your post you will get some results from it, especially if you have created audiences but that is a whole different blog post.

But pressing that big blue button is generally also the quickest way to burn cash as it is so limited in options.

This is what happens when you press the ‘Boost Post’ button. You should see something similar to the image below?

You only have a few demographic options as to who you can target and you do not have the extra options like being able to choose between Desktop or Mobile devices. You are forced to choose both.

The way I am going to show you allows you to choose specific towns or even place a pin on a map where you want to target, choose which demographic you want to target and so many more options.

E.g. When placing ads for Local Business Domination I can be so specific and say I only want males aged 30-45 who are in a relationship, engaged or married that live within
a 6 mile radius of my office!

Pretty cool hey? I want you to think of this as LEVEL 2 of Facebook Advertising.

But how do you do this? You need to access Ads Manager to be able to get this level of detail.

Now if use Facebook Business Manager like I do (its grey in colour) in your top left hand corner click the 3 lines and your see a menu similar to the image below.

If you manager your Facebook business page from your personal account you can hit top right hand corner under the small white trianagle. If you press this you get various options but at the very bottom you will see in small writing ‘Manage Ads’ (almost as if Facebook doesn’t want you to find it!).

First you will see a dashboard of all your previous campaigns or if you have never done a Facebook Ad you will need to set your account up.

Press the ‘Create Ad’ button, this is where the real options begin!

No depending on your account you will see one of 2 options. (I am not sure why people see different options at this moment. Could be to with the amount you spend?)

If you see option 1 you will see a familiar option of ‘Boost your posts’ or if you see option 2 you want ‘Engagement’. As we started on boosting posts, I will carry on with this option but both with you give you the same options on the next step.

Press the ‘Boost your posts’ option.

Call the campaign something that will make it easy to remember.

E.g. For the purpose of this blog post I have called it ‘Facebook boost test 1 – 12th November 2016’ so I know when I look at previous campaigns in the dashboard in the future it is easy to identify what the campaign was about.

Then comes the good bit where you get to use all the extra options you don’t get with the LEVEL 1 Boost.

On next screen you be defining your ad set.

For most of you, you don’t need to target the whole of the UK. So change the location to where you want to target. Type in the town or towns you want to target in the location box. You can use post codes too.

You will notice the needle on the right dropping from 15,000,000 (everyone in the UK on Facebook) to several hundred thousand or several hundred depending on the size of the town or village you are targeting.

Facebook now allows you to drop a pin on exactly where you want to target. So press the ‘+’ button on the map to zoom in like you would on any map. Press the ‘Drop Pin’ button and click it to the exact position of your business. You can now create a radius around your business rather than the town you are focusing on.

You can drop a number of pins on the map so you target a number of different target locations.

Once you have decided which location you want to target, the default setting is to target everyone is this area. For most of you, you only want to target people that live in these locations and not those that have visited the area.

Once the location has been set the next step is to think about the demographics of the people you want to target in the area. You can change the age, gender or language your target user speaks.

Under detailed targeting you can add even more demographics like relationship status, how old their children are, job titles, brands, the list goes on and you will need to spend some time researching the different targetting available to you.

You can even target people who use a iPhone! The list is endless. Do bear in mind that most of these are worded in American phrases.

The last option add is a connection type. This allows you to target people who may or may not be connected to your fanpage, users of your app or people who have attended or unattended a event you may of hosted on Facebook.

In the image below your see I have chosen males aged 30-45 who live within a 6 mile radius of my office who are a admin on a Facebook business page. It is just a hunch but if they are a admin of a Facebook business page they are either a business owner or in a marketing role within the business, which is exactly who I want to target.

I could also try entrepreneurs, small business owners, they have an interest in FSB or even a celebrity business owner like Alan Sugar or Richard Branson.

The colum on the right tells me how many Facebook users potentially fit my criteria. You might not be able to see from the image but it tells me there are 5600 males aged 30-45 who live within 6 miles of my office and are admins of a Facebook business page.

Now that is how you laser target your idea client rather than just boosting your post to random people!

Do not target everyone in the same advert!

Now you know all the different options of demographics, detailed targeting and connections the most important thing to remember is NOT to target loads of different options all in the same campaign.

This is where I think most people fail with Facebook advertising.

IMPORTANT – If you clump every demographic, interest or connection together in the same advert you are not going to know what is working and what is not.

Once you have created your advert you will have an option of creating a similar advert. This allows you to have the same advert but make changes to the the exact ad you just created or could create another ad.

So for instance one of the reasons I know 30-45 year old men are my best customers for business coaching is because I tested the same advert in same location to different age
groups of men.

I used the same advert, but targeted 3 different age groups of men who are aged 20-29, 30-45 or 46-59 the age group that always gets the most clicks and conversions
is the 30-45 year old men.

But if I targeted 20-59 year old men in the same ad I wouldn’t really know which age group is the most responsive.

I also wouldn’t target men and women in the same advert as the language, picture you use and colour will appeal to different genders.

It is important you understand for you to get the most out of Facebook advertising, it is all about TESTING, TESTING and more TESTING to see what works and what doesn’t.

IMPORTANT – You will not create the perfect campaign on your first attempt!

Where should I place my ad?

The next part will ask you where you want to place your ad. It will automatically be on ‘Automatic Placements’ as this is the recommended setting.

However I know from previous testing my ads work best on mobile and desktop news feeds.

I found the right hand column didn’t work that well as people know it is advert and seeing as 90% of Instagram users are aged 30 or below it probably is not the best place for me to target males aged 30-45!

You need to test this for yourself to see what works best for you.

By pressing the advanced options you can even say you only want to target iPhone/iPad or Android mobile devices and only target mobile users who are using Wi-Fi rather than 3G or 4G data.

This is quite good if your wanting to send people to your website and your wanting them to take action on something. If they are using mobile data they might not have a strong enough signal and you have just wasted money on getting them to click on your ad.

How much should I spend?

After you have filled out all your demographics it will ask you how much you want to spend.

Guess what! Facebook will happily help you spend your money!

I can’t tell you how much you should be spending. It will depend on your marketing budget (you do have one of those right?!)

What I will say is spend what you feel comfortable spending and can afford. It comes back to consistency, to really master Facebook ads you really need to commit to creating campaigns every month.

I tend to choose the option of Lifetime budget, that way I know I am never going to spend more than my budget but more importantly It also allows you the extra option of Ad Scheduling.

This means you can maximise your spend on the hours that your customers are on Facebook.

This is where your testing comes in, I have found I get a better response from ads if I put them out during the hours of 6pm-9pm Monday – Friday and 4pm-10pm on a Sunday.

But this might be different for your audience so it is important to test this yourself.

If your budget is quite small then it also means your money will be spent during the hours that people are quite responsive to ads rather than at 3AM in the morning when people are either drunk or scrolling through while they feed the baby!

Again this comes back to really understanding your perfect customer. What do they do during the hours of the day?

In terms of the optimization for ad delivery I mostly leave this on the automatic setting. When I have tried to get all geeky and really technical it hasn’t made much difference to the price of the click or engagement so for most of you I would stick to the automatic setting until you have used Facebook Ads for a while, start seeing some results and you feel like playing around a bit more.

Next step is to create your ad…

Once you have told Facebook the demographics you want to target and how much you want to spend you have to finalise your Ad. You have several choices now and a preview of what your ad will look like.

You can create the ad here but I tend to create the post first on the business page so I choose an existing post.

It will also give you a preview of what your ad will look like depending on the placement choices you made.

There is also options of tracking conversions but again that is whole different blog post. Keep it simple to begin with!

Place your order…

That is it!

You’re now ready to press the ‘Place Your Order’ button and wait for the Facebook gods to approve your advert!

This process is pretty much exactly the same in Ads Manager regardless of whether you choose to boost post, website clicks, video views, etc.

But I think your agree you get so much more options than just pressing the boost button right?

My Ad was Disapproved…

There are so many rules as to why your ad might have been disapproved.

Facebook has quite tough rules about the sort of things you can advertise, especially regarding weight loss, sex, discrimination and drugs. So if your business is a local brothel that also sells drugs you may struggle!

If your ad is disapproved it will tell you why and what you need to change to get it approved. Personally I have always found it quicker if a ad is disapproved to start again with a new ad and make the changes needed than trying to get an ad that was disapproved to approved.

From experience there are ads I seem to get approved that some of my clients do not seem to get approved, which I think is to do with how much I have spent over the years with Facebook ads and their accounts are newer.

Keep it simple!…

The way I see Facebook ads is pretty simple, if you spend £100 and you double your money in sales. Repeat the process and upscale. If you do not get any leads or sales, you need to do something different and try a different approach. But not every ad will be about sales or leads, boosting a post could be about engaging with your customers.

You might of also heard of something called Power Editor. I call this LEVEL 3 of Facebook Advertising but I would concentrate on do your ads this way before mastering Power Editor.

Did this help?

I would love to know if any of this helps you or if you followed my steps and got a better result than just pressing the boost button so please leave me a comment below.

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